I think it's fair to say there's nothing thermonuclear, shall we say, in the August 6th Presidential Daily Brief released this afternoon by the White House. But Condi Rice's claim that the information contained in it was primarily of an historical nature seems at least to leave out some key points.
(You can read the thing yourself here in a .pdf file.)
The first portion of the document covers past plots and efforts by al Qaida against US interests and within the US itself. Then towards the end of the memo it moves into the present with a few tidbits which do raise some questions.
The second to last item says that in the previous three years or so the FBI had observed "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent wtih preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
The last item says that there were currently 70 FBI field investigations the Bureau considered "Bin Ladin-related" and that the FBI and CIA were following up on "a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
There's certainly far, far less here than you'd need to do anything specific to counter what was coming. But you can't say there aren't some hints: preparations for hijackings, casing of federal buildings in New York (presumably New York City), a three month old tip saying bin Laden operatives were in the US planning some sort of bombing attacks.
Elsewhere in the memo it reports that bin Laden was intent on retaliating in Washington for the 1998 missile attacks on his camps in Afghanistan.
I agree with Robert Wright who wrote, on the Times OpEd page yesterday that the real scandal is not so much what the administration missed pre-9/11 but that they kept to a clearly outmoded vision of national security as solely a matter of conflicts between states even after 9/11 had shown that viewpoint to be seriously inadequate.
Still, the one issue doesn't invalidate the other.
The next question is what the White House, or the CIA or the FBI or whomever, did to follow up on these very fragmentary leads.
--Josh Marshall
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend of mine who <$NoAd$>spent a career in US military intelligence specializing in counter-terrorism is now in Iraq working as a contractor providing security for companies and NGOs.
I received this update from him this morning ...
The fighting two nights ago was loud and widespread throughout the northern and northwestern parts of Baghdad ... areas such as Yarmouk, Sadr City had almost continuous gunfights and rocket attacks. When we heard US forces using the main gun on M-1 tanks at 1 AM we knew it was serious insurgency at hand. The night is no longer the refuge and domain of the Americans. I have to tell you although the wide open areas of Iraq give a false sense of security. Even though much of this is unseen to most people the situation has gone from bad to really bad to unbelievably bad! Westerners are getting hit everywhere. Security companies escorting CPA, themselves and other Westerners are now on the menu for all the armed resistance groups. There was a report of a massive ambush by one security firm that tried to drive in from Amman. Reports have 25-40 gunmen opening up on them. They lost all of their vehicles and had to be given a mercy lift by a passing Iraqi minivan. Several other firms lost western security personnel killed this week in drive-by ambushes and even a seige by the Sadr Militia. Several NGOs, security firms and military bases were literally under siege for days in Kut, Nasiriyah and Baghdad. The boldness and sophistication of the attacks is staggering and it is clear that every one of the resistance fighters and Islamic militiamen have taken heart at the ease of inflicting damage on the Westerners. The abductions of the Japanese hostages is a sign that we have entered a new phase of bad as abduction requires a permissive environment for the hostage taker.I refer to this entire mess as the second Intifada of Iraq. The first Intifida was last August in Fallujah when US soldiers killed 15-17 Iraqis and Fallujah fell into revolt. Vehicles are being hit where they are easiest to find and the security firms who are here to protect the Westerners are taking casualties because the US Army and Marines are literally stretched thin throughout the country and quite over their own capacity to stop the violence. The resistance's combat operational center of mass is and will continue moving from known mass resistance organizations (such as uniformed Badr Brigade) to small leaderless or autonomous teams or supporters who are now deciding to do what they please to the first target available. Those targets are easy ... Westerners. Any and all. This burst of energy won't last long though ...
I suspect we will have a cool down period in the next few days or within a week but it will be simply to "re-arm and re-fuel for re-strike and re-venge." A true sustained explosion of violence has yet to be coordinated by the myriad of resistance teams but as the independent or semi-centralized resistance groups form, choose leadership and communicate at the internet cafes, you can be pretty sure the second wave of violence is going to come and it will be equally, if not more, dramatic. This time it won't be men in black uniforms, they have learned that lesson in Najaf ... They will shift to urban terrorism and un-uniformed attacks. God forbid if Sadr is killed or captured ... then we have an entire second front that won't give up until we leave.
General Kimmet is wrong if he thinks that he will destroy the Badr brigade or Sadr Army as a military organization because there isn't really one ... he will disperse them into small, highly armed teams of friends and ... voila! Al Qaeda-Iraq or Hezbollah-Iraq will be borne in numbers we will not be able to control. Since the ICDC [the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] seem to have run off and joined the opposition in Nasiriyah it may reflect the true loyalties of the new Iraqi army and Police. No one is going to cross their family, tribe or religious community for the Americans.
The correct answer is to back off, leave Sadr alone and start to throw lots of money into jobs projects and utilities for the south before this summer's electricity and gas shortages ... will that work? Probably not. But we have just antagonized the core of the Shiite resistance and putting them to work is better than letting them fight us 24/7. General Sanchez is right about one thing ... this is not Vietnam ... Oh no, its not that easy. I refer you to Israel humiliating defeat in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah's armed resistance for a reference to our potential future.
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
Putting out the fire with gasoline<$NoAd$>.
From the AP ...
The people of Fallujah carried their dead to the city's soccer stadium and buried them under the field on Friday, unable to get to cemeteries because of a U.S. siege of the city.As the struggle for Fallujah entered a fifth day, hundreds of women, children and the elderly streamed out of the city. Marines ordered Iraqi men of ''military age'' to stay behind, sometimes turning back entire families if they refused to be separated.
''A lot of the women were crying,'' said Lance Cpl. Robert Harriot, 22, of Eldred, N.Y. ''There was one car with two women and a man. I told them that he couldn't leave. They tried to plead with me. But I told them no, so they turned around.''
What does this sound more like to you? Southern Lebanon in the early 1980s or the West Bank in 2002?
Nice choice, isn't it?
Our troops have been placed in an impossible situation by a blundering leadership that laughed off the warning signs and friendly advice for a year until the situation blew up in their face.
Awful. Unforgivable.
--Josh Marshall
Contemporary history? This from the Associated <$NoAd$>Press ...
President Bush's August 2001 briefing on terrorism threats, described largely as a historical document, included information from three months earlier that al-Qaida was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack, according to several people who have seen the memo.The so-called presidential daily briefing, or PDB, delivered to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001 -- a month before the Sept. 11 attacks -- said there were various reports that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the United States as early as 1997 and continuing into the spring of 2001, the sources told The Associated Press.
The Post says top White House aides said "they hoped they could soon declassify and publicly release at least some portion of the written briefing."
--Josh Marshall
Department of troubling juxtapositions <$NoAd$>...
At the center of a storm brewing for more than two weeks, Rice on Thursday consistently stressed before the packed hearing room on Capitol Hill that the Bush White House was fully engaged against al-Qaida.She also repeatedly suggested the administration was hampered because it had been in office for only 233 days before the attacks.
April 9, 2004
Chicago TribuneU.S. soldiers in Baghdad evacuated police stations and the town hall in Baghdad's Shiite Muslim district of Sadr City after five days of fighting with supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Agence France-Presse reported.
April 9, 2004
Bloomberg NewsOn Saturday, Bush and his father were to go fishing at the ranch's bass pond with a crew from the Outdoor Life Network's "Fishing with Roland Martin."
The White House approached the network about coming to film Bush, who is eager to cultivate an image as a sportsman with the millions of voters who hunt and fish. The crew was to bring its own boat for the shoot on the small pond.
April 9, 2004
Associated Press
What will we tell the children?
--Josh Marshall
There are all manner of disputes and atmospherics surrounding Condi Rice's testimony yesterday. The key, however, is the dispute over the FBI tasking and related questions raised by Ben-Veniste, Kerrey and Roemer.
--Josh Marshall
From a Friday Washington Post story on the degenerating situation <$NoAd$>in Iraq ...
This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.
and this ...
Bush spent the morning watching national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's televised testimony to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then toured his ranch with Wayne LaPierre Jr., chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and other leaders of hunting groups and gave an interview to Ladies' Home Journal. He is not scheduled to appear in public until Sunday, when he will visit nearby Fort Hood, the home base for seven soldiers recently killed in Baghdad.
Vacation gibes are usually unfair. But with the situation in Iraq so critical, shouldn't the president be at the White House? It's a full-time job, comes with a decent salary.
--Josh Marshall
A quick note on Condi ...
I watched a good bit, but not all of the testimony this morning.
My reactions were mixed; and I feel in some respects ill-equipped to judge her performance because a) I go into it with a dim view of her and b) I knew many of her statements to be falsehoods or thorough distortions of what happened.
It seemed a good idea on Rice's and the White House's part to tone down the criticisms of Richard Clarke -- but that leaves some question as to how they became so generous to someone whom a week or more ago they were all but accusing of being a criminal.
On the level of atmospherics, she struck me as surprisingly tense and anxious during her opening statement. And she tried to skate through on many points by resorting to repeated instances of semantic mumbojumbo like the fraudulent distinction between "rolling back" al Qaida and "eliminating" al Qaida, or her equal frail distinction between tactics and strategy.
--Josh Marshall
Department of Faint Hearts and Narrow Escapes. Commentary is such an inherently assertive form of communication that it's a good thing to find ways to have fun at your own expense when possible.
As many of you know, I spend a good bit of time working at a Starbucks near my home in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. And this morning I was in one of my normal seats, talking on the phone to a colleague, when I noticed a group of police surrounding the building with that yellow 'emergency' tape they use to cordon of areas or for crime scenes or whatever.
So I watched this out of the corner of my eye for a bit. And as they started to seem more intent about it, I got off the phone and went over to the front door where a few employees had congregated and were looking out seeing what was going on.
I asked what was up and was told, in a fairly nonchalant way: "Suspicious package outside, no one can come in or leave."
I didn't like the sound of that. And when I looked over and saw the package about three feet from the side of the building I liked it even less. Cover the war on terror? Yes, but not that close. And in any case I thought to myself, I've seen this miniseries before. And I'd really prefer to leave now in my accustomed unitary form.
So after a few moments of haggling with the Starbuckians (I've got a meeting! I simply must go!), they unlocked the door and I skedaddled out past the yellow tape perimeter and then scrambled home.
A short time later, with a bit, but not all, of my manhood recovered, I ventured back with my camera to see what was going on. It seemed the cops having coffee and donuts handed out among them probably meant that things weren't too far gone.
A bomb expert did various tests on the box and, a short time later, the package-formerly-known-as-suspcious was whisked away never to be heard from again.
--Josh Marshall
In case you haven't seen it, take a look at Peter Bergen's list of nine questions that should be asked of Condi Rice when she appears before the 9/11 Commission. It ran on the Times OpEd page on Sunday.
Think of it as a sort of aspirational playbill for tomorrow's show.
I don't have time to write at length on this as I've got an editor (justifiably) breathing down my neck over a late article draft. But when considering tomorrow's testimony, bear in mind that few people across the ideological spectrum believe that Rice has been an effective National Security Advisor.
People on the (relative) left like Powell's team at State; those on the right prefer Rumsfeld and the neocons at DOD. The Strangelovians go for Cheney at OVP. But across the board people fault her managerial competence.
Every administration has its interagency antagonisms, often between the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. But this one's in a class by itself on pure disorganization and factionalism.
Think how many problems this administration has had which deal with one hand not knowing what the other is doing, contending factions pursuing contrary policies simultaneously. That's what the National Security Advisor is there to ride herd over.
Sometimes if no one is completely happy it means you must be doing something right. Other times, it just means everyone can see you're not doing your job.
--Josh Marshall
Don Rumsfeld today at the Pentagon: "U.S. forces are on the offense. The United States and our partners and free Iraqi forces are taking the battle to the terrorists."
--Josh Marshall
Sigh ... Is it immediately clear to you who this statement is about?
"They have concluded he was so surrounded by sycophants he had no real idea of what was happening in [Iraq]."
[ed. note: Special thanks to TPM reader JML for the tip.]
--Josh Marshall
Ages and ages ago we told you how Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith ran the office charged with doling out Iraqi reconstruction contracts. And we told you how Feith's law partner, Marc Zell -- amazingly contravening the law of averages -- had happened to set up a special lobbying shop to lobby for companies looking for sweet Iraq contracts.
And then, because we didn't want to leave out any details, we noted that Zell had opened that new operation with Salem Chalabi. And, yes, Salem is Ahmed's nephew.
Now it turns out that in addition to his entrepreneurial activities, Salem is also in charge of setting up the Iraqi war crimes tribunals, which will eventually try Saddam Hussein.
All of which should reassure you that as messy as things may be at the moment, we're at least freeing this sad land from corrupt dynasticism and clan rule.
--Josh Marshall
Several readers were kind enough to tell me <$NoAd$> that on his radio show today Al Franken mentioned TPM. That put me in the mind of this brush with greatness I had a little earlier in my career, which I recounted in a reporter's notebook item I wrote while on assignment for Salon covering the impeachment of President Clinton in January 1999. It was my first time in Washington as a reporter ...
Maybe the funniest impeachment moment came from comedian Al Franken, who was attending the trial with one of the prized yellow impeachment tickets as a guest of some senator -- he wouldn't say which one. After a few minutes of conversation, Franken and I and a few others were shooed out of the hallway by a Capitol police officer, and we took the elevator back up to the Senate gallery. Before I knew it, Franken and I were sitting together in one of the rooms where senators give press conferences.Sen. Phil Gramm had just bounded into the room to do a little damage control about Sen. Robert Byrd's proposed motion to dismiss. Apparently one of the first rules of the Senate is that no one can ever criticize Bob Byrd about anything, and Gramm did his best to comply. He told us he'd just spoken to Trent Lott, and he made a strained argument about how it would be wrong to cut the trial short, even if it was clear the House didn't have much of a case. Franken raised his hand and asked Gramm whether he would have voted for the articles of impeachment if he were in the House, knowing what he now knew. Gramm seemed to have no clue who Franken was and proceeded to ignore the question and pipe on about justice being a process, not a verdict.
Franken and I chuckled about Gramm's refusal to answer the question, and suddenly two spindly arms reached across me and grabbed Franken and started to pull him out of his chair. It was a woman from the Senate press office, barking, "You have to leave. You're not press." Franken pointed to me and said, "But I'm with someone from the press" as he was being rushed out of the room. But he stayed in character through the whole thing, laughing as he got tossed out. That really drove the woman crazy. She mustered up her schoolmarm best and scolded him: "It's not funny!"
I rushed out of the press room after Franken got the boot. But by the time I got out into the hall, he'd already slipped back into the Senate gallery -- where celebrities, but not the press, are allowed to roam free.
Those were the days.
--Josh Marshall
This short piece on the BBC website is the first I've seen to suggest a small hint of how this situation in Iraq might be walked back. Will alone solves nothing. With will and guile, there's at least a chance.
Bag the Clausewitz and try the Liddell Hart.
--Josh Marshall
Wow, that is a good line, and a very true one too. Courtesy of Atrios, comes this line from Harold Meyerson's column today in the Post ...
The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.
We have backed ourselves into a very narrow <$Ad$>and very bleak set of options here. What's astonishing is how blindly the White House seems to have stumbled into it.
I don't want to get into a silly conversation about who's 'responsible' for what's happening in the South or who 'caused' it in some deep sense. But we do seem to have triggered it -- by shutting down Sadr's newspaper and arresting his deputy.
One might argue that that was a proper strategy. Sometimes a looming crisis needs to be brought to a head. But if that's so, we seem to have done little to prepare for the reaction. Where's the White House's strategy? Where is it now, three days later?
All we seem to be hearing are hollow assertions of a vacant will.
From the White House's advocates we hear logic puzzles about appeasement in which the fall-out from the president's screw ups become the prime argument for continuing to support them.
At the critical moment the president has the toxic mix of the bulldog will of a Winston Churchill and the strategic insights and imagination of a Neville Chamberlain.
He has no plan. And will without policy just equals death.
The gap between the reality in Iraq and the White House's Potemkin village version of it is closing rapidly, like an upper and lower jaw about to shut tight. And the White House's penchant for denial is being squeezed between the two.
--Josh Marshall
Oh well ...
When Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Tex.) took charge <$NoAd$>of an independent political fund called American Dream PAC in 1999, he made clear that its mission was "to give significant, direct financial assistance to first-rate minority GOP candidates."Since then, only $48,750 -- or 8.9 percent -- of the $547,000 the southwest Texas congressman has raised for his political action committee has gone to minority office-seekers while more than $100,000 has been routed to Republican Party organizations or causes, including a GOP redistricting effort in Texas, a legal defense fund for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Bonilla's reelection campaign. Most of the remainder of the money went to legal fees, fundraisers in Miami and other cities, airline tickets, hotels, catering services, consultants and salaries.
The piece is in tomorrow's Post.
--Josh Marshall
This is really extraordinary. Finally we have an example of White House stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission in which all the dross of bogus national security flimflam and the impurities of dishonest classification mumbojumbo have been burned away to reveal the pure, hard nugget of political scamliness and antipathy toward letting the public know the truth.
You'll remember a few days ago I posted a few comments about the speech Condi Rice was scheduled to give on September 11th, 2001 -- a speech endorsing National Missile Defense as the cornerstone of a new national security policy as well as a response to a speech by then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden the day before.
Obviously, the speech is a sore matter for the White House since on the very day the country was hit with what was arguably the worst foreign attack on American soil in the country's history, Rice was scheduled to endorse a new defense strategy and technology which would have done nothing whatsoever to prevent it.
Not surprisingly, the Commission would like to see the speech, only parts of which the Washington Post was able to get access to in their article last week.
But the White House is saying 'no': the speech is 'confidential'.
But you have to ask, why?
Confidential work product?
Unless the argument is that we can't let our enemies know the depth of the poor judgment displayed by the president's national security team it is searchingly hard to fathom what possible national security issue could be implicated by handing over the speech since it was -- do we have to say it? -- a speech! A speech for public consumption.
Like almost all the other restrictions the White House has placed on the Commission, this is just so they won't be embarrassed politically. They don't like the Commission. Again and again they display open contempt for its work. They didn't want it created in the first place. And they've tried to obstruct its work at almost every turn.
All that's different here is that the political nature of the obstruction is undeniable.
--Josh Marshall
Possibly a more innocent <$NoAd$>explanation.
Yesterday we noted a testy exchange between President Bush and AP reporter Pete Yost in which the president appeared to upbraid the reporter for addressing him as 'Sir' as opposed to 'Mr. President.'
Today, there's this from Dan Froomkin's online column in the Washington Post. After reprinting the same transcript, Froomkin adds ...
Not entirely clear was whether Bush was ticked off because Yost didn't call him "Mr. President" -- or if Bush thought Yost was talking to someone else on his mobile phone. [Update: I am now told that Yost had a phone to his ear. That would tick me off, too.]
The president's swipe still strikes me as uncalled-for. But this certainly puts the matter in a different light. If anybody else was there and has more to add, please drop me a line.
--Josh Marshall
A number of readers have written in to ask whether the "Joshua Marshall" who is the registered owner or registrant or whatever of 'bushflipflops.com' is this Josh Marshall.
Well, yes. It is.
About a month ago I registered the domain.
In large part, my immediate motivation was to make sure someone else didn't get it who, shall we say, didn't have a true and sincere interest in exposing the president's long list of broken promises, changed positions, and highly disparate interpretations of the same facts.
My plan was either to set the site up myself or hand it off to some other organization or individual who was interested in setting up a site dedicated to the president's distinguished record of flipfloppery.
I'm already so pressed for time that I'm really not going to have time to do anything with it myself. So if you're that organization or individual, drop me a line. I'll pass it on for the $35 registration fee or, just as likely, for nothing at all.
--Josh Marshall
Our dilemma ...
As the days go by, a full-fledged Shiite <$NoAd$>uprising in Sadr's support is looking less likely. Most Shiites, about 60 percent of Iraq's population, insist that they should become the arbiters of political power. But they see fighting for it now - with the US still battling Sunni insurgents - as premature....
Iraq's major Shiite political parties, like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, are reluctant to stand up to Sadr's militants, afraid they could lose standing for siding too closely with the US.
They're hoping that the US will deal with Sadr's people for them, leaving them free to criticize the operation if public anger grows at the civilian, predominantly Shiite casualties in Baghdad's Sadr City, the holy city of Najaf, and the southern town of Nasariyah.
Take a moment to read the rest of this article out today in the Christian Science Monitor.
Also note this passage from a dispatch just out from Voice of America ...
The head of the al-Quds Center for Political Studies in Jordan, Uraib el-Rantawi, says the coalition should be very careful in dealing with Mr. al-Sadr, in part because he has strong Shi'ite religious connections outside of Iraq."He has a very good connection with the Iranian clerics, especially Ayatollah Hahari," he said. "He is one of the most leading clerics among the Iranian regime. Moqtada al-Sadr, from the early beginning, tried to put himself in a certain manner in order to be a legitimate representative of the Shi'ite people in Iraq.
"And, he is trying to take the example from what happened in Lebanon with the leadership of Hezbollah and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin of Hamas in Palestine," continued Mr. el-Rantawi. "And, I think it is very, very dangerous to underestimate his role in the Iraqi Shi'ite population and in the region."
More soon ...
--Josh Marshall
I must say I am stunned at how quickly things seem <$NoAd$> to be coming apart in Iraq, particularly in the south. I can't imagine this particular takeover will be permitted to last for long. But at least for the moment, according to CNN, Sadrist forces have taken control of Najaf, a city of a quarter million people and one of even greater religious significance.
Here's a brief report I got this morning from a friend working as a private security consultant in Iraq (but not for the CPA), who we should be hearing more from in the coming days ...
Hey Josh ... thanks for the concern . I wrote the other day but power went out. This place is HOT! I am driving with max Iraqi bodyguards (whom I have just finished training), max weapons and max bodyarmor. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING with this Moqtada Sadr thing? Were they just bored with Fallujah. The place is a hornets nest now. Armor is all over the streets but doesn't seem to have disrupted most city life ... I told [a reporter] two weeks ago we were "one massacre away from the second Intifada of Iraq." Well I think we are there now.
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
No one ever thought President Bush would win California this November. But this is a steep plunge. A new poll out Monday puts his approval in the Golden State at 38%.
--Josh Marshall
A short note on Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States Attorney from Chicago running the Plame investigation.
I'm told this isn't the first time he's done a leak investigation of the Bush White House.
This earlier investigation, which was in 2002, grew out of Fitzgerald's investigation of a series of Muslim charities accused of having ties to terrorism -- the Holy Land Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and the Benevolence International Foundation.
My point isn't that the White House did something else wrong. In fact, I'm told that in this case the White House really hadn't done anything improper at all.
But Fitzgerald was pissed and apparently went after them very aggressively -- and this for a case in which, I'm told, there really wasn't much to go after.
This might be something to keep in mind when figuring how the Plame investigation might play out.
--Josh Marshall
I'm here at my desk in the middle of the night working over interview notes for an article I'm writing and I see this late wire story from Iraq: "Iraqi Shi'ite Militia Battles Italian Troops."
In brief, Sadrist militiamen are engaged in what seem to be running battles with Italian troops in Nassiriya.
According to the report, the Sadrists have burned four Italian military vehicles and they still control streets near the local CPA headquarters.
The casaulties, at least as reported so far, seem relatively light.
But this has now been going on for several days. And these aren't terrorist attacks, bomb blasts or ambushes. These are continuous armed battles in which the insurgents are -- for at least periods of time -- taking control of parts of cities that are right up near, if not on top of, the symbols of the occupation authority itself.
In Karbala, says the Post, "Sadr's followers attacked a police station and a television station. In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, they occupied the governor's office and traded fire with British troops."
In an urban warfare context there's obviously not always a bright line between all out war and isolated guerilla attacks. But this sounds a lot more like the former than the latter. And especially in areas where there aren't large concentrations of American troops, these sound a lot more like standoffs or worse than situations where coalition troops can quickly mobilize and stamp out the attacks.
We really do seem to be on the brink here. Like a top, once its even spin turns into a reckless wobble, these things can be very, very hard to right once they fly out of control.
According to the Times, Tony Blair is coming to Washington next week for crisis talks that won't be called crisis talks. From the Times article ...
British officials say that while they are sympathetic with the daunting management task that Americans have undertaken, they also believe that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Mr. Bremer has become too "politicized," meaning that events are orchestrated and information controlled with the American political agenda uppermost in mind.
A very difficult situation has been worsened by the political priorities of key decision-makers in the occupation authority. But that fact seems more like an afterthought when you consider how dire a situation we've backed ourselves into.
--Josh Marshall
What was this about? From the beginning of a late morning press conference ...
THE PRESIDENT: I just met with Specialist Chris Hill's family from North Carolina. You know, I told the family how much we appreciated his sacrifice -- he was killed in Iraq -- and assured him that we would stay the course, that a free Iraq was very important for peace in the world, long-term peace, and that we're being challenged in Iraq because there are people there that hate freedom. But the family was pleased to hear that we -- its son would not have died in vain. And that's an important message that I wanted to share with you today.
Let me ask you a couple of <$NoAd$> questions. Who is the AP person?
Q I am.
THE PRESIDENT: You are? [Then ask it]
Q Sir, [what 'a], in regard to --
THE PRESIDENT: Who are you talking to?
Q Mr. President, in regard to the June 30th deadline, is there a chance that that would be moved back?
THE PRESIDENT: No, the intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same. I believe we can transfer authority by June 30th. We're working toward that day. We're, obviously, constantly in touch with Jerry Bremer on the transfer of sovereignty. The United Nations is over there now. The United Nations representative is there now to work on the -- on a -- on to whom we transfer sovereignty. I mean, in other words, it's one thing to decide to transfer. We're now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty. But, no, the date remains firm.
I'm genuinely unsure what to make of that.
[ed. note: the portions in brackets are my additions based on hearing the audio.]
--Josh Marshall
From today's Nelson Report ...
Gloom...has been building over Iraq. Increasingly, the <$NoAd$>Wise Heads are forecasting disaster. Wise Heads say they see no realistic plan, hear no serious concept to get ahead of the situation. Money, training, jobs...all lagging, all reinforce downward spiral highlighted by sickening violence. There seems to be no real "if", just when, and how badly it will hurt U.S. interests. Define "disaster"? Consensus prediction: if Bush insists on June 30/July 1 turnover, a rapid descent into civil war. May happen anyway, if the young al-Sadr faction really breaks off from its parents. CSIS Anthony Cordesman's latest blast at Administration ineptitude says in public what Senior Observers say in private...the situation may still be salvaged, but then you have to factor in Sharon's increasing desperation, and the regional impact.Note: "quagmire"...when you are in a bad situation you created yourself, and would quit in a minute if you could, but which if you did, it would make everything else worse. So you can't...and it gets worse anyway. (Apologies to Bierce...)
1. Comes word from Very Senior Foreign Policy Observers that the situation now unfolding in Iraq is "a qualitative change of very profound significance. The chances of something like a general breakdown after the July 1 transfer is accelerating." The Observation continues: "Even if [dissident cleric Muqtada] al-Sadr is arrested, the whole question is whether the Shi'ia majority is comfortable with continued U.S. occupation." The suggested answer seems to be "no".
-- the Observer goes on to warn that, on the basis of personal soundings within the Administration, the conviction arises that the White House has "no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work." This Observer last week relayed a concern that President Bush was not being given accurate reports from Iraq, but today, one assumes that even a President who prides himself on not reading the newspapers now grasps that things are not necessarily proceeding to our advantage, to borrow an historic phrase.
More to follow ...
--Josh Marshall
Hats off to Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post for a truly well-deserved Pulitzer awarded today for coverage from Iraq.
--Josh Marshall
January 56% ... February 48% ... March 47% ... April 43%.
President Bush's approval ratings from the Pew Poll.
--Josh Marshall
The best way to get out of a hole is generally to stop digging -- at least, that's the first, critical step, without which nothing else matters.
Along those lines see this critical passage from Christopher Dickey's review of Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers in yesterday's Times ...
The coalition invasion force was less than half the size of the one that liberated Kuwait in 1991, because that was all that was needed to defeat Hussein's eviscerated services. But professional soldiers realized a lot more boots on the ground would be needed to maintain order once the dictator went down and the occupation (''the O-word'') began. The soldiers' concerns were ignored. The wishful assumptions of the Pentagon civilians about the after-war were just as wildly off base as their intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. ''The abrupt transition to anarchy was a disaster not only for Iraq but also for the United States,'' Atkinson writes. ''Pentagon planners in early May had predicted that U.S. troop levels would be down to 30,000 by late summer; instead, at Christmas the figure was 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq, with another 30,000 in Kuwait.''
Mull on that for a moment.
The people who planned and advocated for this war hadn't the slightest idea what they were getting into. All the plans, all the <$Ad$>assumptions, all the notions of what would flow from this came from that basic inability to grasp the reality of what they were entering into.
Think about it: down to thirty-thousand troops -- a smattering for a country the size of Iraq -- only three or four months after the end of fighting. Think how mind-bogglingly off the mark that was.
Some of this comes into perspective in a column Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley wrote in the Washington Post on the eve of the war (Feb. 28th, 2003).
It shows that the administration had done a lot of planning. They just had no idea what to plan for. Hadley's main points are plans to deal with humanitarian disasters in the country.
If you put yourself back in that mindset the Bush politicals had as of early 2003, the idea was that the great mass of the Iraqi population would be in sync with what we were doing and eager to participate. Our role was being there at the ready to help them deal with crises brought on by the war or by the internal degeneration of the country in the years before it: ready to ship in water, food, help repave the roads, technical assistance getting their economy in order and reformed, etc. That's what we'd be there for. And thus we could pull most combat troops out after a few months.
The idea that we'd need a vast army of occupation -- hopefully one with some multinational flavor -- to make everyone keep their heads down while we went about with the serious and risky business of nation-building simply didn't occur to them. Thus the treatment of Shinseki.
Here are the second through seventh grafs of Hadley's piece ...
Securing this liberty and sustaining it in a post-Hussein Iraq will be a huge undertaking. But we are well prepared. Planning has been underway for months, across every relevant agency of the U.S. government.The goals for which we plan are clear. First, along with our coalition partners, we must ensure the rapid flow of humanitarian relief into Iraq. The current humanitarian situation in Iraq is tenuous. For food, most Iraqis rely on rations from the oil-for-food program. But the Iraqi regime's manipulation of the program has led to mortality and malnutrition rates worse than before the Persian Gulf War.
Hussein has a history of manufacturing humanitarian crises. We must be prepared for this -- and we are.
The U.S. government is stockpiling nearly 3 million Humanitarian Daily Rations to meet emergency food needs. We are also stockpiling blankets, water containers, essential medicines and other relief items capable of helping up to a million people. Much of this material is already in the region, and more is on the way.
To distribute these and other materials, we will rely primarily on civilian relief agencies. We are counting on the efforts of international organizations such as the United Nations and the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as various nongovernmental organizations. These groups have the expertise, personnel and equipment that can literally mean the difference between life and death. We will fund and facilitate their efforts to the greatest extent possible.
In circumstances where no U.N. agencies or nongovernmental organizations are available, the U.S. military may be required to provide limited relief. Such relief will be under the guidance of civilian experts, with the goal of getting civilian agencies into these areas as quickly as possible.
To coordinate all this activity, the U.S. government is training a 60-person civilian disaster assistance response team, the largest in U.S. history. Made up of humanitarian emergency professionals from several agencies, the team will soon have representatives in Kuwait, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar.
This crew simply didn't understand what they were getting into. It was an intelligence failure even more difficult to grasp than the fiasco over WMD -- and in this case it stemmed entirely from administration political appointees in the face of unanimous contrary advice from everywhere else in government.
They've never copped to that misunderstanding, even to themselves. That team can't save the situation.
--Josh Marshall
The news from Iraq today of scattered clashes between US/Coalition forces and armed crowds and Shia paramilitaries is the worst news to come out of Iraq for months.
Measured purely in the terms of American casualties, today's death toll was not as bad as some of the bloodiest days of the occupation. Seven US soldiers were killed in what appears to have been a ferocious running battle in Sadr City, the vast Shia slum in northeast Baghdad. Two other soldiers, one American and another Salvadoran, were killed in similar clashes in Kufa. Other outbreaks of similar violence seem to have spanned the entire country.
The difference here is the type of violence and who's fighting.
Even if the US occupation had been welcomed by most Iraqis, there almost certainly still would have been major car-bombings and other terrorist acts. It's just not that hard, in that part of the world, to find people willing to strike violent blows against the US, even at the expense of their own lives. And as we've seen from Madrid, one doesn't need widespread or even any support in a country to mount such attacks.
Meanwhile, almost all the paramilitary violence -- the shootings and ambushes and roadside explosions -- have come from the Sunni minority concentrated in the center of the country.
Violence from the Sunni areas has never been difficult to understand. They lost out on privileges and status when Saddam was overthrown. And the future looked even more bleak, because the eventual handover of authority to a democratically elected government all but insured the domination of the Shia majority which the Sunnis had been lording it over for decades if not centuries.
In other words, time was never on the side of the Sunni rejectionists. From the start their interests were in destabilizing and delegitimizing the occupation.
Time, however, was very much on the side of the Shia. From a cynical viewpoint, why not let their American and Sunni enemies bloody each other into exhaustion in the central Iraq and sit back and wait on the day -- not too distant, certainly -- when they would inherit the new Iraqi state?
A central question has always been, when would the Shia come off the sidelines? A number of Sunni attacks have been aimed at triggering just that. (For a prescient analysis of this dynamic see part one of TPM's interview with Joe Wilson from last September.)
Now, they seem to have come off the sidelines with a vengeance, though the particular trigger here seems to be factional rivalry within the Shia community.
In any case, it really amounts to the same thing. Part of the myopia of the Iraq is hunky-dory crowd was not to recognize -- and in this case I'm talking really about political spinners in Washington, the policy types across the political spectrum understand this -- that the key ethno-factional groupings in the country have been hanging back and strengthening themselves to have it out with each other after we depart. As I noted earlier with the Shia, they were in no rush: why not let us kill a lot of their Sunni opponents while they prepare for the real battles -- either political or paramilitary -- after we leave?
It will be critical to see, in the coming days, whether this is one spasm of violence (organized by the young firebrand Muqtada Al-Sadr in response to being shut out of the political process by the Americans) which can be brought under control or whether this is the first day of a new phase of violence or even uprising.
The reality is that the US doesn't have anywhere enough soldiers in the country to control the place if there's this sort of widespread violence on an on-going basis. That could quickly lead to a vicious cycle which will put a virtual end to reconstruction and prevent the coming into being of any entity for us to hand the place off to. In Jefferson's ugly phrase, we may end up holding the wolf by the ears.
That's my brief take -- I'm drowning in several deadlines, so no more for now. For a more lengthy and far more knowledgable overview see Juan Cole's running coverage.
--Josh Marshall
The Associated Press on the hyper-politicized Coalition Provisional Authority.
Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who's now Energy Secretary, heads the office packed with former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics.
As the gibe around Baghdad has it, they don't call it the Republican Palace for nuthin'.
--Josh Marshall
Interesting. In previous posts I've noted the inherent problem with having Philip Zelikow serve as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission when <$NoAd$>he is a close associate of Condi Rice and was one of the three principals who ran the Bush foreign policy transition team -- a key focus of the investigation he's running.
But here's some evidence of some ability to rise above that conflict. From the new Newsweek ...
Last Monday morning 9/11 commission executive director Philip Zelikow faxed a photograph to the White House counsel's office with a note saying that if the White House didn't allow national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify in public before the commission, the photograph would"...be all over Washington in 24 hours," Newsweek has learned. The photo, from a Nov. 22, 1945, New York Times story, showed presidential chief of staff Adm. William D. Leahy, appearing before a special congressional panel investigating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The point was clear: The White House could no longer get away with the claim that Rice's appearance would be a profound breach of precedent.
A pity he has to resort to soft blackmail to get their attention. But perhaps he knows the language they understand.
--Josh Marshall
An important article in the Sunday New York Times presents a long, detailed and I would say generally mixed picture of the Bush administration's handling of mounting threats of a major terrorist attack during the spring and summer of 2001.
The article makes clear that the quickening pace of threat warnings was far greater and more ominous than we've been led to believe.
"The warnings during the summer," says the article, "were more dire and more specific than generally recognized." And it provides numerous -- often chilling -- examples to demonstrate that fact.
The White House was tracking the warnings and took some steps to prepare for or possibly head off an attack. But the effort was scattered and uncoordinated and seemed to diminish in urgency and attention after a White House meeting in early July.
The plans for a renewed push against al Qaida -- which the administration has repeatedly called attention to -- were there. But there was apparently little sense of urgency behind them, especially when judged against the escalating threat level. And they were not as robust or militarily-focused as administration officials have led us to believe.
There's a lot in this article to digest. I'd say it provides a decent amount of ammunition for both sides of the debate, though the general picture is one of a White House giving only episodic attention to the escalating threats while focusing on other administration concerns like missile defense. Critics of the White House will point to the more intense focus given to the terrorist warnings around the turn of the millenium -- which Clarke himself has repeatedly noted.
I suspect the follow-on to this article will focus on who the prime movers were in taking the actions that were taken. Was it Clarke and folks like him trying, only half-successfully, to get terrorism on to the front burner? Or were Rice, Hadley and others themselves the ones pushing for the attention the threats did receive? The article seems particularly unclear on these points.
One point to keep in mind, though: the article's heavy reliance on unnamed administration officials in reconstructing the story of what happened in those crucial months. It will be interesting to see how the picture they paint holds up in the questioning of Condi Rice and the articles and further analyses that are certain to follow.
Keep in mind too that Rice's job as National Security Advisor is to coordinate the various national security related departments and agencies to deal with immediate and long-term threats. And on that count, if only in an organizational sense, the article paints a poor picture of the job she did.
--Josh Marshall
